Jamshedpur, Nov. 16: Saheed Parvez, the owner of a minibus, was arrested today after being caught red handed for stealing suitcases of passengers travelling on trains.

Parvez’s joy ride of stealing suitcases was put to an end after Railway Protection Force (RPF) jawans caught him for allegedly steal- ing a suitcase on the running Puri-New Delhi-Purushottam Express.

Later, RPF jawans handed him over to the Government Railway Police (GRP) personnel, Tatanagar.

Rail superintendent of police (Jamshedpur) Priya Dubey, who interrogated the accused, revealed that the thief owns a minibus, which runs in the adjoining West Singhbhum district.

“Parvez, a resident of Mango, confessed that he bought a minibus. He took a loan from a nationalised bank for purchasing the bus besides using the money accumulated through stealing,” Dubey said,

Parvez operated in an organised manner on moving trains between Tatanagar and Kharagpur under the South Eastern Railway (SER), he added.

“The accused, equipped with sophisticated machines for cutting suitcases, travelled in reserved coaches of trains with valid tickets. He used to travel with a gang of over six members,” Dubey said.

She said that Parvez used to unlock the suitcase of passengers on the moving trains with the help of sophisticated instruments and decamped with the booty.

“He never used to alight from the trains with his subordinates. He used to travel from the originating point of the train to its destination to avoid suspicion of fellow passengers,” Dubey said while explaining the modus operandi of the robbers.

The accused did not reveal when he committed the first theft on running trains but hinted that he had been working thus for the last couple of years, she said.

GRP sources said the police have arrested one person on the basis of Parvez’s statement.

“The police are interrogating him. If there is enough evidence against him, we will lodge a case against him as an aide of Parvez,” a policeman said.